Joia – o bio elepê pau-brasil de Caetano Veloso

Abstract

This text presents Joia, an album released by Caetano Veloso in 1975, as a “bio elepê pau-brasil”, whether due to the tropical and Brazilian treatment of the melodies, or the excess of verbal, vocal and melodic quotations, or the organicity of the album. By enhancing the matrices of our central themes, such as the original peoples of the Americas, Africa and the Brazilian Northeast, on the same totemic axis, the bio elepê Joia is a fundamental manifesto in the songwriter’s aesthetic project, since Caetano Veloso engenders a biopolitical Brazil possible, creating a counter-discourse that rejects the systematic erasure of “minor”, ​​subordinated and underestimated languages. Themes, verses and dictions return, creating the organic unity that makes up a brazilwood and rhizomatic bio elepê, in which the songs present a thematic and rhythmically-melodically pulsating Brazilian entity.